Gamejam 1.0 – III

Read more: Gamejam 1.0 – I and Gamejam 1.0 – II

Because my Twine plan hadn't quite worked out the way we'd hoped, the idea that we could use the Twine page to facilitate changing levels in the Unity player wasn't viable anymore, making the compiling, exporting and embedding process quite a bit more laborious.

Pencils Down!

With only 90 seconds to spare, we got everything into a playable state hosted on our wee Mac mini server. It was exciting, we were exhausted and tense, but there was food and drink and we were surrounded by other nerds. It was a safe place.

We went and got slices of fresh pizza, opened some bottles of beer and hovered around our computer. One of the elements of a gamejam is that once it's done, everybody goes around and plays other people's games. Every person there was handed a lego piece and encouraged to go around playing other people's creations, awarding lego pieces to your favourite. It's a cute way to vote.

Play on

I have to admit, that even though I was frustrated by the technical problems we had and disappointed by the lofty goals we'd missed, I was excited when we had our first curious customer approach our table. He sat down, laughed where he should have and then started playing. Watching someone play your game for the first time is a lot like watching someone watch your film for the first time, except that this game is a dynamic, unfinished thing, whereas the nature of film production makes it difficult and expensive to alter a film once it's watchable.

I became very focussed on how people reacted to certain lines of text. One person came along and was visibly frustrated by the controls and didn't mind saying so. What really surprised me was how glad I was for the feedback since it was entirely actionable. If it hadn't been against the rules I would have shoved him out of the seat so I could fix the problem and then sit him down again so he could have more fun.

To be continued.